Using procedural techniques, the game universe has been designed to be huge and realistic. There are billions of solar systems and planets, each unique and awaiting to be discovered by a player... maybe you ? Coherent scales and distances are used, orbits of celestial bodies are correctly modeled and change continuously, allowing you to attend a sunrise on the moon of a giant planet, for instance.

Making-of the video
Before I get into details of what's actually shown in the video, a few words about the making-of the video itself, which took more time than expected. What a pain! First of all, it took many hours to record the video, as each time I forgot to show something. In one case, the frame rate was really low and the heavy stress required to dump a 1280x720 HQ uncompressed video to the disk. The raw dataset is around 10 GB for 14 minutes of footage. 14 minutes? Yep, that video is pretty long. Quite boring too, which is to be expected since there's no action in it. But I hope you'll still find it interesting.

Once the video was recorded, I started the compression process. My initial goal was to upload a HQ version to YouTube and a .FLV for the video player embedded on the website. The second was quite easily done, but the quality after compression was pretty low. The bitrate is capped to 3600 kbps for some reason, and I didn't find a way to increase it. I suspect it's set to this value because it's the standard with flash videos. I also wanted to upload a HQ version to YouTube to save bandwidth on the main site, but so far it's been disappointing. I tried many times, each time YouTube refused to recognize the codec I used for the video (surprisingly, H264 isn't supported).

After a few attempts I finally found one that YouTube accepted, only to discover that the video was then rejected due to its length: YouTube has a policy to not accept videos that are more than 10 minutes long. What a waste of time. So instead I uploaded it to Dailymotion, but it's very low-res and blurry, which I cannot understand since the original resolution is 1280x720; maybe it needs many hours to post-processing, I don't know. There's also now a two parts HQ video uploaded to youtube: part 1 and part 2 . If you're interested in watching it, make sure you switch to full screen :).

Content of the video
The video is basically split in 3 parts:

1. Demonstration of a space station, modelled by WhiteDwarf and using textures from SpAce and Zidane888. Also shows a cockpit made by Zidane888 ( I'll come back on that very soon ) and the Hornet ( textured by Altfuture ).
2. Planetary approach and visit of the ring. Similar to what's already been demonstrated in 2007.
3. Seamless planetary landings.

Cockpit
I've been very hesitant in including the cockpit in the video, simply because of the expectations it could potentially generate. So you must understand that it's an experiment, and in no way guarantees that cockpits will be present for all ships in the game at release time. It's still a very nice feature, especially with the free look around. You will notice that you can still see the hull of your ship outside the canopy, which is excellent for immersion. Note that the cockpit isn't functional, so if we indeed integrate it to the game one day, I would like that all instruments display functional informations, that buttons light on/off, etc..

Background
The backgrounds you see in the video ( starfield, nebula ) are dynamically generated and cached into a cube map. This means that if you were located in a different area of the galaxy, the background would be dynamically refreshed and show the galaxy from the correct point of view.

Each star/dot is a star system that will be explorable in game. In the video, as I fly to the asteroids ring, you will see that I click on a couple stars to show their information. The spectral class is in brackets, and follows is the star's name. At the moment, star names are using a unique code which is based on the star location in the galaxy. It is a triplet formed of lower/upper case characters and numbers, like q7Z-aH2-85n. This is the shortest representation that I could find that would uniquely identify a star. This name is then followed by the distance, in light-years ( "ly" ).

I still have to post a dev-journal about the procedural rendering of the galaxy on the client side, in which I'll come back on all the problems I've had, especially performance related.

Planet
I'm not totally happy with the look of the planet, so it is likely that in the future, I will at least do one more update of the planetary engine. There are various precision artifacts at ground level, as the heightmaps are generated on the GPU in a pixel shader ( so are limited to 32-bits of floating point precision ). I've also been forced to disable the clouds, which totally sucks as it totally changes the look & feel of a planet seen from space. The reason for that is that I implemented the Z-Buffer precision enchancement trick that I described in a previous dev journal, and it doesn't totally work as expected. With clouds, the clouds surface is horribly Z-fighting with the ground surface, which wasn't acceptable for a public video. At the moment, I use a 32-bits floating point Z-Buffer, reverse the depth test and swap the near/far clipping planes, which is supposed to maximize Z precision.. but something must have gone wrong in my implementation, as I see no difference with a standard 24-bits fixed point Z Buffer.

The terrain surface still lacks details ( vegetation, rocks, etc.. ). I still have to implement a good instancing system, along with an impostor system, to get an acceptable performance while maintening a high density of ground features.

Look & Feel
Don't think for one second that the "look & feel" of the camera and ship behavior is definitive in this video. I'm pretty happy with the internal view and the cockpit look, but the third-person camera still needs a lot of work. It theorically uses a non-rigid system, unlike the ICP, but it still needs a lot of improvements.

Effects
As you may notice, the ship's thrusters correctly fire depending on the forces acting on the ship, and the desired accelerations. Interestingly, at one given point in time, almost all thrusters are firing, but for different reasons. First, the thrusters that are facing the planet are continuously firing to counter-act the gravity. It is possible to power down the ship ( as seen at the end of the video ), in which case the thrusters stop to work. Secondly, many thrusters are firing to artifically simulate the drag generated by the auto-compensation of inertia. For example when you rotate your ship to the right, if you stop moving the mouse the rotation will stop after a while. This is done by firing all the thrusters that would generate a rotation to the left. Of course, some parameters must be fined tuned.

When the ship enters the atmosphere at a high velocity, there's a friction/burning effect done in shaders. It still lacks smoke particles and trails.

This video will also give you a first idea of how long it takes to land or take off from a planet. The dimensions and scales are realistic. Speed is limited at ground level for technical reasons, as higher speeds would make the procedural algorithms lag too much behind, generating unacceptable popping. At ground level, I believe you can fly at modern airplanes speeds. A consequence of this system is that if you want to fly to a far location on the planet, you first have to fly to low space orbit, then land again around your destination point.

I had exactly this vision several years ago, but with i-novae, this seems to become possible. What's a drawback for FPS elements though is the fact that the environments are all procedural. While you can give planets a different overall appeal like that, you aren't able to create any particular points of interest that you actually design. Imho that's a major drawback.

This engine could make a hell of a mech warrior combined arms mmo game.. Planetary drops, orbital battles, Huge battalions of mechs on the ground.. Players taking over intire worlds.. That would be awesome...